Virtualisation for Education

IT departments are in the front line of the war on wasted money; the need to demonstrate efficiency, whilst driving down costs is more imperative than ever. It’s a high-profile position to be in; every new weapon in the IT manager’s cost-cutting armoury is a welcome addition.
 
One of the most effective ways to cut cost: Virtualisation

One of the easiest, and most effective, ways of saving money is to implement a programme of server virtualisation. If you have been delaying virtualisation because of the amount of work involved, now is the time to reconsider, says Clive Longbottom, service director at analyst firm Quocirca: “Virtualisation is an investment – the rapid payback is phenomenal. If you possibly can, invest in virtualization within your data centres because of the savings you will gain on maintenance, on energy into the data centre, and in the real estate in the data centre.”

Knock 75% off your energy bills…

Data centres are hugely inefficient users of energy. A traditional server can run only one operating system, and it typically operates at only 10 percent of its capacity - while still consuming large amounts of energy. Longbottom explains: “If a server has a 70 watt CPU, and you’re only using 10 percent of it, it’s probably still using about 55 watts.”

Not only is the server wasting energy, but the additional cost of cooling the server is about four times the cost of running it. “You’re running at 10% utilisation, but paying for the best part of 100% of the server, plus four times that in peripheral costs as well,” says Longbottom. “It’s unsustainable.” That’s a cost to the environment and also a major hit to the IT budget. Virtualisation, however, enables one physical server to run different operating systems, and thus behave like several virtual servers. Instead of running at 10% of capacity, the physical server works at 50% or more of its capacity. Four out of five servers in the data centre can be switched off, saving both the running costs of those servers and the cost of cooling them. Virtualization also postpones the necessity of having to find a bigger data centre to house servers: as usage grows, you can simply switch unused servers back on.

All you need to deploy a virtualised environment

As James O’Neill, IT Pro evangelist at Microsoft, points out, many of the normal costs associated with moving to virtualisation don’t apply for Microsoft customers. “What differentiates Hyper-V is that it’s just part of Windows,” he says. “From a cost point of view, where these institutions have got the necessary licences to run Hyper-V already, they don’t have to enter into another support contract to manage the virtualisation stack, and if you’re sending people to be trained on the operating system, they’re coming back trained on virtualisation as well.”

The biggest challenge comes after implementation, says O’Neill, because creating a virtual server is so easy that an you can quickly find the number of servers proliferate: “When you buy physical boxes, someone has to sign the purchase order and that slows down the rate at which you can get them installed. With virtualisation, you can just run a script, and hey presto, you’ve got 10 new virtual machines.” There are apocryphal tales of ‘orphaned’ virtual servers falling off the IT team’s radar.


What are you waiting for?
Even if you are hesitating about implementing a full virtualisation programme, there is no reason to delay starting, says O’Neill: “The main worry people have is whether a particular workload runs in a virtualised environment satisfactorily or not. You can spot the easy ones quite quickly.” While some workloads may take months to switch to a virtualized environment, others may take only 10 days.  Longbottom agrees: “There is no point in not doing it now. As you move forwards, move workloads from physical machines onto virtual machines, and it will become self-sustaining and self-funding.” Don’t linger over the decision to virtualize, he adds: “It’s getting to the point now where it should be a no-brainer.”

In summary
• Servers are expensive to run, take up space and require costly air-conditioning to cool
• Server virtualisation enables you to reduce the number of servers by 80 percent
• The reduction in server usage brings rapid and substantial savings on running costs, cooling costs and data centre space
• Microsoft’s Hyper-V is ready to deploy for customers with Windows Server 2008 licences
• No additional support package is required to implement Hyper-V

Virtualisation technology has moved on!
IBM was the first company to introduce virtualisation as a technology back in 1972 and was primarily a way to consolidate groups of expensive smaller servers into larger, partitioned servers. From that day onwards we associate virtualisation with partitioning servers, however now you can have storage, network, application and desktop virtualisation!

Storage Virtualisation will address the problem that storage devices are never ‘fit and forget’ as they will fill with applications and data, and they need to be backed up and secured. Storage virtualisation fixes this problem by gathering all of the disparate storage devices and presents them to a server as a single logical entity with one point of management.

Network Virtualisation is really a subset of the functionality within the virtualisation software when you create virtual servers. The virtual servers are connected together using ‘virtual switches’. The network administrators can decide to connect the virtual switches to physical network adapters or they can be used by the internal virtual servers only. This addresses two primary business needs of security and LAN traffic optimisation. By keeping the intra-server communications within the virtualisation environment, network administrators can ensure that data traffic is free from eaves dropping, while reducing the amount of data streaming over the physical LAN.

Application virtualisation is a process of centralising the execution and delivery of applications within an organisation. This requires a set of technologies to manage some of a company’s most expensive resources – applications. In effect, the applications run from a remote server (or virtual servers) rather than on the user’s computer. The application’s DLL (Dynamic Link Library) are redirected to the server’s file system. This provides the organisation with easier application management, upgrading and migration; while optimising the utilisation of available hardware resources. As a consequence, organisations see an increase in cost savings on software and operating system licenses.

Desktop virtualisation is different from application virtualisation in one principle way. Application virtualisation is delivered to the desktop from the servers but uses the operating system on the desktop to manage the desktop’s hardware functions – desktop virtualisation is the server delivering a complete desktop with operating system to the terminal or hardware employed by the user. In a virtual environment, the provisioning of virtual desktops requires a brokering system in the virtual environment to automatically allocate virtual desktops to users. This allows an organisation to deploy Windows-based thin clients.

Virtualisation Capacity Planning at Equanet

Equanet can offer a comprehensive Capacity Planning service by assessing your insitutions capacity and ability to create a virtual environment, and will include the following:

• Initial assessment of the physical infrastructure and define the servers that need to be monitored
• Analyse the servers for a period of time of 30 days to ensure that monthly peaks are observed
• Build a report to detail from the data gathered
• Analyse which servers are a fit for virtualisation
• Determine how much memory, processing power and i/o will be required in terms of physical infrastructure to support the virtual environment
• Establish server and shared storage specifications to future proof the solution for 2, 3 or 5 years
• Deliver the report to discuss various options with you, such as “aggressive” consolidation, high redundancy and high capacity.

For further details, please contact your account manager.